


A Very Compound Christmas

by SegaBarrett



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Compound Days, Gen, slightly AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-21
Updated: 2015-01-21
Packaged: 2018-03-08 13:10:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3210365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Todd tries to make the season bright for Jesse, with some... interesting gifts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Very Compound Christmas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rebness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rebness/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Breaking Bad, and I make no money from this.
> 
> A/N: Disregard Granite State's events. 
> 
> Also, Uncle Tom's Cabin is I believe in the public domain, but still by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Jesse opened his eyes slowly. At some point during the night, he had turned over on his stomach and rolled off of his tiny mattress. There was something metal sticking into his stomach, and he winced as he slowly got up and tried to brush the dirt off of his shirt. It wasn’t like he was going to be getting another one soon; Jack had told him he better take care of that one. 

Light streamed in through the hole in the grate, and Jesse slowly looked up, shielding his eyes. 

Todd appeared on the ladder, feet first. Jesse pulled back, sliding towards the back of the grate. He bit his lip hard.

Todd’s feet hit the ground, and he looked towards Jesse with an expression that seemed to be damn near jovial.

“Jesse! Do you know what today is?”

“Another batch?” Jesse mumbled, rubbing his eyes. He wished he could just roll back over and go back to sleep, not that he ever got any good sleep in here anyway. He had been here a week… he thought, at least. It felt like a lifetime. He’d come up with a number of escape plans, but none that seemed to have any prayer of working. He’d caught a glimpse of the barbed wire fence and the cameras. 

“No!” Todd yelled. Jesse winced and put his hands over his head. “It’s Christmas!” Todd waved his arms around as if he was trying to make some kind of a point. “It’s just like Uncle Jack said! Nobody remembers Christmas anymore! It’s all this… this… people are destroying the world!”  
Jesse stared at him.

“I brought you gifts from all the guys!” Todd sounded very excited, and Jesse wondered whether he could trip him and knock him into the wall of the grate. All things considered, he probably wouldn’t feel it. Jesse suspected that Todd was one of those guys who didn’t have any nerve-endings and, as such, didn’t have any kind of human interaction with the world. They could also poke out their own eye and not realize it, which had always been a terrifying thought to Jesse. After he had learned about that in Science class, he hadn’t wanted to go to class for the next three weeks. 

“Oh,” Jesse managed. A little voice was reminding him that if he played up to Todd, maybe he could find a way out, but it was hard to get up the energy to do so. Trying to smile just hurt his face.

Todd was carrying some kind of big sack, and Jesse briefly worried if it was going to be Andrea, Brock, or Mr. White in there, dead or alive.   
Instead, it was a bunch of packages that had been wrapped by people who obviously weren’t very good at wrapping packages. 

“Here!” Todd exclaimed, thrusting a small box in Jesse’s direction. “This is from Uncle Jack!”  
Jesse took it and slowly stared down at it, unwrapping it with one eye on Todd at the same time. Knowing him, getting killed while opening Christmas presents wasn’t out of the question.

He felt a burst of pain at wondering whether Brock was opening his own gifts right now. If Jesse had only known, he would have gotten him something. No use wondering about that now, not if he never got out that was.

The wrapping paper (Jesse noticed it was a “White Christmas” motif and wondered if they’d gone with that on purpose or missed the irony) gave way to a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Jesse blinked. 

“Uh, thanks.”

“Yeah!” Todd chuckled, “Uncle Jack thought that’d be funny.”

Jesse blinked again.

“And this is from me.” Todd was bouncing on the tips of his toes as he handed Jesse something sort of long and floppy. Jesse was terrified. The last thing he wanted to do was open something from Todd’s heart. 

Jesse opened it to find six copies of Hustler. He put them aside before he could inquire as to whether they’d been hand-me-downs.

“And this is from everybody.” 

They hadn’t even bothered to wrap this one. It was a mug that said “I Love My Boss”.

Jesse let out a little laugh.

“…Thanks,” he mumbled, guessing it was better than being beat up. That could be debatable, however. 

“Bye Jesse!” Todd exclaimed. “Merry Christmas!” He ran up and pressed a kiss to Jesse’s lips, then scampered back on up the ladder.   
Jesse stared at the wall for a long time. He figured that he could smash the mug to make a weapon at some point, and he didn’t really want to think much about the Hustlers and where they had been previously.

He plucked up the copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, however. There wasn’t a lot of daylight left. 

He flipped open the first page, and as he began reading he became certain of the fact that neither Jack nor the others had actually read this.

“Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P——, in Kentucky. There were no servants present, and the gentlemen, with chairs closely approaching, seemed to be discussing some subject with great earnestness. For convenience sake, we have said, hitherto, two gentlemen. One of the parties, however, when critically examined, did not seem, strictly speaking, to come under the species…”

“Sounds like Jack,” Jesse mumbled as he read on. He shut his eyes and pictured himself as George Harris, escaping from tyranny with his beautiful wife, Eliza (it wasn’t so hard to picture Andrea there, even unbidden), by his side. And their son, of course. They’d never let them get their hands on him, they’d make it all the way to Canada. Or Alaska. 

It was damn near impossible back in the 1800’s, Jesse mused. But people had done it. He gazed up at the tarp and wondered if they knew what they’d given him. They’d stumbled into giving him hope.


End file.
